Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Thursday, March 29, 2012

The Sociological Breakdown

Looks like what we already knew.

...In the March 21st NYT, Nicholas Kristof reviews a new book: ”The Righteous Mind”. In it, author Jonathan Haidt discusses some original research that investigates some key values held by conservatives and liberals – and how these two groups perceive each other on these values....

...Americans speak about values in six languages, from care to sanctity. Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three. And some (me included) mostly use just one, care for victims.

...for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns (although they think of fairness and liberty differently) and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity. --RedState quoting N Kristof/NYTimes

8 comments:

Nice job, Dad29, at butchering at the context of his quotation and not delving into the deeper meaning of his work. The author is an evolutionary cultural psychologist who believes morality, ultimately, is a human construct.

In the words of the author...

"So if you just let one team—liberals, conservatives or libertarians—run everything, they're going to screw up because they don't have a full tool kit. My highest hope for my book is that it will help people get some perspective on moral disagreements. We're all morally motivated (apart from 1 percent who are psychopaths). Each side sees truths about how to run a good society which the other side can't see, so we need everyone's insights."

"Morality is a basic aspect of human nature just like, say, musicality or language. Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood. This is all part of our "groupish" nature."

"Dividing into teams doesn't necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility. Dividing into groups increases social capital and trust, it's generally a good thing. But when it crosses the line from "we disagree with you" to "you are evil," then people begin to believe the ends justify the means and all hell breaks loose. That's where we are now in the U.S. where politicians and their consultants will do all kinds of devious, underhand, sometimes illegal things to help their party win and to damage the other party. They think that if you're fighting Satan, it's OK to break the rules."

Did you even bother to check the author's credentials before posting his work and labeling your post "The Sociological Breakdown"?

You linked to a person whose work supports a particular point of view you espouse..and then call him a "statist" because his reasoning which supports your point of view contradicts the value system you embrace.

"His 'reasoning' cannot possibly support my "point of view," although his conclusions seem to be valid."

Gobbledygook on your part.

Your PARTICULAR point of view, one that you touted through inference, i.e. "looks like what we already knew", was that conservatives have a different--and proper--outlook on morality compared to liberals.

You then provided two specific quotations as reasons in support of that contention. Good for you!

Yet, the reasoning provided by the author, based on your own admission, is one rooted in Statism.

However, the conclusion the author arrived at--morality is a human construct--runs counter your own conclusion--morality is based on a law of nature and a law of God.

Put another way--The author's conclusion that conservatives and liberals have a different outlook on morality stems from his reasoning that morality is a human construct. By your own admission, the author is a statist for even touting such a position because his reasoning is "flawed". So you contradicted yourself in your effort to use "sociological data" to support your overall point of view that humans are governed by a morality laid out by God.